Since the introduction of Siri, mobile technology has been pushing the limits of speech recognition. Now, thanks to the help of deep neural networks (DNN), speech recognition on Windows Phone just got twice as fast while increasing accuracy.

The Bing team has been hard at work improving Windows Phone speech recognition, and rather than releasing the update alongside an entirely new operating system like Microsoft’s biggest competitor does, it has been rolling out minor updates improving the service. Rather than just add some algorithms to, for example, make individual accents more understandable to Windows Phone, Microsoft Research turned to deep neural networks in order to spruce up the device’s speech recognition capabilities. In non-complicated neuroscience terms, deep neural networks are frameworks for automatic pattern recognition that work similarly to the way pattern recognition works in the human brain. So, speech recognition on Windows Phone was twice as fast and 15% more accurate because it now thinks a little more like the brain of its user.

The deep neural network research isn’t just one-and-done after its application to Windows Phone speech recognition, as it could be used for other services that rely on speech recognition, such as more precise dictation, as well as language translators.

Considering the DNN research is being used to literally teach machines how to think like a human brain thinks, we could all probably count ourselves lucky that Microsoft is only using it to double the speed of and increase the accuracy of speech recognition.